Oregon To Vote On Suicide By Prescription

`Death With Dignity' Measure Has Strict Limits

November 06, 1994|By Karen Brandon, Tribune Staff Writer.

PORTLAND, Ore. — The day when Tim Shuck can no longer laugh is the day he plans to take his life. His Oxford shirt starched stiff, his beard exactingly trimmed, Shuck has given the same fastidious attention to the details of his death.

A fragile looking man of 45, he wants to die before AIDS wastes him into someone who does not recognize his own friends and family, before he withers into a state he equates with mere existence, not living.

He spent much of his career working with an outpatient surgery center, and he says friends in the medical field have assured him they will get him the necessary lethal dose of medicine. The central question is not whether he will take the step, but whether it will be legal.

"I have a right to do that," he says in a soft but firm voice. "I would like to have the legal right to do that so the people I care about don't have to worry about being prosecuted for breaking the law."

Oregon voters will decide Tuesday which it will be. A ballot initiative, the Death With Dignity Act, will allow doctors to write lethal prescriptions for terminally ill patients who request them. Passage of the measure would make Oregon the first state to legalize physician-assisted suicide.

Similar ballot initiatives failed in California and Washington after strong early support waned by Election Day. In Oregon, support has fallen from 65 percent to 53 percent.

The Oregon initiative places strict limits on the doctor's role. The measure does not allow lethal injections. Patients must take life-ending medication themselves, and they must make three requests for the medication, one in writing. They must wait at least 17 days before the prescription is written.

A second doctor must approve issuing the prescription. And if the patient is believed to be suffering from depression, counseling is required.

The initiative has drawn the ire of the Roman Catholic Church, which asked priests to speak against the measure last month. Their requests for contributions to fight Ballot Measure No. 16 raised $276,000.

Opponents expect to spend more than $1 million-three times the amount raised by the measure's backers.

Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop wrote a strong criticism of the measure in the state's official voters' pamphlet.

"The medical profession cannot be society's healer and killer at the same time," Koop wrote. "Poor, elderly, frail and disabled patients will be the victims if the `choice' to die becomes the `duty' to die."

Oregon Right to Die, a backer of the measure, is a broad coalition that includes doctors and a former Catholic nun who have tended the terminally ill. As one advocate put it, "We do better by our cats and dogs."

The initiative has the support of Gov. Barbara Roberts, whose husband, long-time legislator Frank Roberts, died a year ago after a fight against prostate cancer.

Advertisements on both sides of the issue have been emotional.

"I am a criminal," former registered nurse Patty Rosen says in a television ad for Oregon Right to Die. "My 25-year-old daughter Jody was dying of bone cancer. The pain was so great that she couldn't bear to be touched, and drugs didn't help. Jody only had a few weeks to live when she decided she wanted to end her life.

"But it wasn't legally possible. So I broke the law and got her the pills necessary. And as she slipped peacefully away, I climbed into her bed, and I took her in my arms for the first time in months," Rosen says, her voice breaking.

After the Coalition for Compassionate Care, an organization fighting the initiative assailed Rosen for giving different accounts of her daughter's death, Rosen said she gave her daughter morphine intravenously. Rosen said she did so because she worried that the pills would not be effective.

The coalition countered with an ad featuring a man named Tony, who was told he had cancer and had less than six months to live.

"It's been a year and a half," he says. "I'm still taking it one day at a time, and I'll tell you . . . the grass has never looked greener . . ."

"I might have taken a prescription of suicide drugs from my doctor. I was depressed and confused. But fortunately, it wasn't available, and I'm alive today."

The ad was pulled after it was revealed the coalition had used actors. "The creative team was trying to portray a situation that could occur and did," said campaign director Pat McCormick. The coalition has since made similar ads without actors, he added.

The ballot measure is but the latest event to cast Oregon into the forefront in the debate over the right to die. The state is home to the Hemlock Society, which supports the measure but did not initiate it.